Gosnell guilty in killing of 3 babies

Gosnell, 72, was charged with four counts of first-degree murder. | AP Photo

Forty-one percent of American voters think that media bias was behind the lack of coverage of the Gosnell trial, 26 percent think it’s because the trial is a local crime story, 17 percent said it was because of the grotesque details of the case, according to a Fox News poll released last month about the apparent media blackout.

Gosnell had also faced 24 counts of performing abortions on women who were pregnant for more than 24-weeks — Pennsylvania’s gestational age — and he had faced 227 counts in connection with performing abortions before a mandatory 24-hour waiting period, according to The Philadelphia Inquirer.

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Authorities had charged that he was as an unqualified OBGYN who performed countless illegal abortions, often on underprivileged young women. His clinic raked in millions of dollars during the estimated 30 years he illegally practiced abortions in grotesque conditions, including bags and jars of fetuses scattered throughout the building.

Authorities said he routinely — more than one hundred times — induced labor and killed the babies by cutting their spinal cords, but they couldn’t charge him for many of those case because he had destroyed records.

In often graphic and emotional testimony, medical assistants and employees of the clinic testified that they snipped babies’ spinal cords under Gosnell’s instruction.

Gosnell did not testify in the trial and his defense attorneys did not call any witnesses. In opening arguments, defense attorney Jack McMahon evoked race. “It’s an elitist, racist prosecution,” McMahon said, according to The New York Times. “This black man is being taken because of who he is and where he works.”

In cross-examining the prosecution’s witnesses, the defense argued that the babies’ deaths were unintentional because the mother was given an abortion drug that should have killed the fetus before it was born, The Philadelphia Inquirer reported.

Assistant District Attorney Joanne Pescatore questioned in her opening statements whether Gosnell kept the dead baby as “trophies” in his clinic.

“If the baby is alive and you don’t want it to be, that doesn’t mean you have the right to take a pair of scissors and plunge it into the baby’s neck,” Pescatore said, according to The Times. “Disturbing: that’s an understatement. Was he keeping trophies for what he had done?”

In January 2011, authorities released a more 250-paged Grand Jury report.

“This case is about a doctor who killed babies and endangered women. What we mean is that he regularly and illegally delivered live, viable, babies in the third trimester of pregnancy – and then murdered these newborns by severing their spinal cords with scissors,” authorities wrote in the Grand Jury report.

“The medical practice by which he carried out this business was a filthy fraud in which he overdosed his patients with dangerous drugs, spread venereal disease among them with infected instruments, perforated their wombs and bowels – and, on at least two occasions, caused their deaths,” the report continued.

During closing arguments by Gosnell’s team, McMahon told the jurors that there was not sufficient evidence to convict the doctor, urging them to go against the “tsunami” of press coverage.

“You have a choice, a real choice … to roll with the tsunami of simplistic press and rhetoric, or the choice to stand against the power of that tsunami,” McMahon told the jury, according to The Philadelphia Inquirer.

In an interview last month before the verdict, President Barack Obama used the trial to restate his position on abortion when asked about the case.

“I think President Clinton said it pretty well when he said, ‘Abortion should be safe, legal and rare,’” Obama told NBC’s Savannah Guthrie in an interview that aired last month. “… If an individual carrying out an abortion, operating a clinic or doing anything else is violating medical ethics, violating the law, then they should be prosecuted.”